3

HE WAS RIGHT, obviously, the fledgling detective. I left Tel Aviv in the nick of time.

Too many women like me have walked the streets there – all of us good-looking, polished and prim, clever, sharp-edged, hovering like butterflies and prickly like a fertility-test needle, all of us ticking time bombs, tick-tock, tick-tock, no tot, no tot.

Last week, during a lecture called “Childfree by Choice: Women without Children,” held at a bar in Tel Aviv, a doll was tossed into the crowded room; it was one of those cheap, ugly ones, without eyelashes. It was naked, and the words “Mummy dearest” were written in red ink on its forehead. Once the hysteria died down, virtually every woman in the bar took a photo of the little dolly and posted it on her Facebook page, along with a withering indictment of police incompetence.

The perps were caught two days later, two boys who were so worked up about the ritualistic murder, about the growing frenzy and mostly, by their own admission, “about the possibility that finally we have a serious, creative killer in Israel,” that they decided to pitch in with their efforts. In the newspaper photo they looked like a couple of Moomins, soft and spongy, and I wondered which of the two had undressed the doll. I’d put my money on the ugly one.

And Dina was there, everywhere you looked there was Dina, or rather, Dr Kaminer – in those flattering profile pieces, with heavy-handed hints about her private life (under the guise of investigative journalism), in the eulogies by her colleagues and in the familiar press photos. They kept publishing the one in which she was caught grinning, looking ruddy and wild, her smile – revealing the gap between her front teeth – slightly silly, and more than anything, very out of character.

I have no doubt that if she were still alive, she’d be calling the editor to demand a more appropriate photo, and her demands would be met. She was a master of the art of persuasion: aggressive and charismatic, used to getting her way. But none of that helped her in the end, did it?

That particular article was also dredged up. One of the newspapers reprinted it, verbatim, and I photographed it and turned the image into my screensaver.

I noticed that the people who quoted from the article hadn’t actually read it, but merely regurgitated the same inane assumptions that appeared in the papers without variation. “Did the women in the Bible actually choose to be childfree? Could it be that Dr Kaminer encouraged women not to give birth? Should childless women be afraid to walk the streets now? Could our women be in danger? Could it be? Could it??” and more and more could-it-bes, all similarly poorly phrased, and not one able to hide its smugness.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, no tot, no tot.

A radio host tried to rev up his listeners with the survey question, “Who would you turn into a mother?” He was suspended immediately, of course, but not before suggesting a few interesting options, including a famous actress who stated she wasn’t interested in having children, a female director who spoke out against childbirth and an emerging young singer who, in her very first interview, announced she had no intention of becoming a mother.

While reading those three interviews, I already knew that within three years all three women would be smiling at us from magazine covers holding their bundles of joy below the identical caption: “Motherhood has changed me.”

Because by now I know that if you’re not interested in having children, you don’t go announcing it to the world like that. It’s something private and profound, which slowly boils in the depths of your consciousness before simmering to the surface, and even then it won’t stop fighting you till your very last egg dries up – I should know.

“Little witch, little witch fell down a ditch. Come out and play! she cried all day. But no one did, and in the ditch she hid…”

I rush to the window to peek outside, and can’t believe kids still sing that. A few children are standing in a circle around a chubby little girl sprawled on the ground with a scraped knee, chanting at the top of their lungs, repeating the words over and over again. The girl in the middle is confused, not sure whether to laugh or cry. I’d advise her to cry.

I slam the window shut and pieces of plaster come flying off the crumbling wall. It’s the window facing Ramat Gan, a city east of Tel Aviv. The windows on the other side of the apartment offer completely different vistas.

This apartment that I have moved back into is located on a curious spot on the map: right on the dividing line between Israel’s ultra-Orthodox epicentre and one of its many nondescript secular cities, an area commonly known as “Bnei Brak bordering Ramat Gan.” Usually it serves as a code name for the residents of Bnei Brak who are more reticent about their background, in which case they’ll say: “I live in Bnei Brak but on the border of Ramat Gan,” even if they live dead in the middle of Rabbi Akiva Street, which is nowhere near Ramat Gan.

But my apartment really is located in between, so when I’m asked “Where are you from?”, I give whatever answer will serve me best. Efraim, the director of the Bible Museum, who finds the fact that I’m religious – even if only tenuously – a hot commodity, will get the answer “Bnei Brak,” while the occasional taxi driver, all too willing to dole out his opinions about synagogue and state, will get the aloof answer: “Ramat Gan.” An answer made to measure. And in general, it’s not bad for a girl to slightly blur her past. I should know.

And there’s another advantage, a secret one.

Whenever I feel the youth draining from my body, feel it on my desiccating skin, my period cut another day shorter, the subtle-yet-palpable slackening of my facial muscles, the bristly hairs sprouting from the tip of my chin, in short, whenever I start doubting my feminine allure, I’ll go moseying along the streets of Bnei Brak, where one always feel lusted after with all those disapproving gazes and reproachful twitches. The slightest bit of cleavage or a skirt cut even an inch above the knee will give you the feeling that you’re Lilith the seductress. It’s a potent youth potion, downright magic.

Maor hated the fact that I was a former Bnei Brak girl; the city seemed inferior and run down to him. When he heard I was planning to move back there, he grimaced, couldn’t understand how I could give up living in Tel Aviv. Even when I explained that I was presented with the opportunity to live almost rent-free in an apartment that belonged to a relative, he shrugged. “It would really bum me out to visit you there,” he said.

I guess it really bummed him out. It must have – we broke up even before the move transpired.

I study the pug-faced doll he gave me back then, during the early glory days of our budding romance, when everything gleamed with promise. I should have seen it for the ominous sign it was. When your boyfriend jokes about the considerable age gap between you, it’s going to end in tears and they’re going to be yours.

It’s true that I told him right off the bat that I wasn’t interested in having kids, both because it was the truth and because I wanted to clear that sinister cloud that turns every woman in her late thirties into an intimidation.

He replied that neither was he – a lie! They’re always interested, especially the more selfish ones among them – and he stuck to it for a long time, until he once asked, “Hypothetically, if you did want a kid, who would you have it with?” I, whose sole intention was to compliment him, immediately blurted, “Only with you, my love,” which of course produced precisely the opposite effect. His eyes turned into dark pools of fear. I think that’s when our relationship’s countdown timer started ticking. Tick-tock.

And now, sitting in my rocking chair the next day in the empty apartment like an idiot, I’m holding an ugly doll and waiting for a call from Maor’s deadly double. Maor’s deadly policeman double.

Every object in the apartment is screaming at you to watch out, but you’re not listening. The walls are boring into you, watching you waiting for the phone to ring, hovering around the device with that hungry expression while the apartment slowly fills with a familiar sensation. It’s called anticipation, and it’s disgusting.

I’m supposed to be glad that I got rid of him so easily, he’s no fool, that Micha, so I’m supposed to be pleased that he went on his merry way without asking the hard questions, supposed to lock the door behind him and spin into a little happy dance. So why the hell am I staring at the phone screen, checking that my battery is still alive? Why can’t I concentrate on anything other than that crazed buzzing in my head? Why? Because you’re a brainless baby, that’s why.

At least good old Google is still waiting for me with open, gift-bearing arms.

I retype “Dina Kaminer” and wait for the deluge of results. No new hits since the last time I checked (an hour ago), no new suspects, no interesting new theories, and the phony concern (with just a touch of Schadenfreude) for the welfare of the city’s single women has been replaced by a few preachy articles about the damage women who keep putting off the decision to have kids are causing themselves blah-blah-blah. In other words, no useful information. I scroll down to the bottom, where the dark world of internet commenters is revealed before me.

It’s incredible how much they hate her. Even like this – murdered, violated, stripped of her dignity and titles – even now they hate her. They always hated her.

And what’s that? A new article. The headline is sentimental – “Dr Dina Kaminer – the mother of all those who do not wish to be mothers” – not bad, kind of poetic, I’m not sure what Dina would have thought about it, but I find there’s a certain beauty to it. The article was written by one of her research colleagues, and the comments inform me that she too is childless. They’re on a downright rampage of wrath and contempt, from comments like “fuglies like you shouldn’t have kids,” classic, to “who would even want to have kids with a selfish raggedy hag with a stick up her fat arse,” slightly banal, the usual displays of verbal diarrhoea, and there’s also the tasteful suggestion: “You should find someone who’ll inseminate you and along with his semen maybe pump a little sense into your sterile brains.”

Oh, well, some things never change.

None of these birdbrain commenters has my way with words.

Now, obviously, I wouldn’t dare write a single syllable; I have no intention of letting some police prodigy connect certain dots that could get me into trouble, but in the past, oh, I definitely wrote a comment or two.

Because unlike these Neanderthals with their predictable and limited scopes of knowledge, I knew Dina and knew just where to strike. I knew where it really hurt. Sheila, you little witch.

In one of her interviews, when she spoke about how “the verbal aggression displayed by internet commenters is owed to their anonymity,” I realized she was on to me; I kept on reading and discovered several other sharpened arrows aimed specifically at me. But I didn’t care, at that point my hatred towards her was far beyond reason.

You see, I hated everything that had to do with her. The passive-aggressiveness that was really just aggressiveness, the dark oily hair she kept in a bun, her bulging, black cow eyes, the giant breasts she carried with the arrogance of a battleship, her self-righteousness, but more than anything, I hated her voice, deep and purring, a velvety voice that belied the steely punch.

That’s exactly how she sounded that Wednesday evening, when she opened the door and said to me, “I’m glad you came.”